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Attracting new customers is good for British betting shops’ business. But the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) has warned that it may also lead to an increase in problem gambling. That’s thanks to changes in the law introduced by the Gambling Act of 2005, which overhauled the outdated 1961 Betting and Gaming Act.
Says the ESRC’s Gerda Reith, a Glasgow University academic: “Under the [1961] Act, the newly-licensed betting offices were required not to encourage loitering. Today’s attractive, comfortable premises are a world apart from that. In particular, their touchscreen fixed-odds betting terminals [FOBTs] are encouraging new types of customers and new styles of play.”
The traditional betting-shop customer is, quite literally, dying out, so in their efforts to appeal to the newer breed of gamblers, betting shops have had to embrace technology. It is the increased turnover of bets that makes FOBTs attractive for locations. Indeed, the ESRC’s report says profits from FOBTs, which were introduced in 2001, now outstrip profits from traditional over-the-counter bets on horse racing, greyhounds and football.
But with a greater number of gamblers comes a greater number of potential problem gamblers, though it is generally recognised to be quite a small percentage of players at risk. Will the proportion of gamblers with a problem increase?
Says Reith: “Gambling itself is not dangerous, it is how people deal with it that can cause harm. That said, some types of gambling are more risky than others and FOBT’s seem to be one of the products most associated with harm at present. For example, we have evidence that some older betting-shop customers who did not have problems with gambling in the past are more likely to develop problems when they start to use betting machines.”
